It was weird. Back when my brother played the Super Nintendo, I viewed it as just another toy to play with. Oh, sure, it was fun to pick up Super Mario World or Donkey Kong Country every now and then, but taking my Sesame Street stuffed animals on adventures and reading through The Berenstain Bears took top priority. It was just another toy, that SNES.
That all changed on January 1998, when my brother received a shiny, brand new Nintendo 64 for his birthday.
I immediately became a convert, and in the end I played the hell out of that thing way more then he ever did.
Mario, Donkey Kong, Yoshi, and Star Fox all immediately captured my heart and refused to let go, and I played their games religiously. I chomped through each of their games hungrily, cementing my childhood with their parties and stories and raps and Gameshark codes. I fell willingly into the Pokemon craze, and I ravaged (literally) through my Nintendo Power magazines, eagerlyanticipating titles such as Mario Party and Pokemon Stadium. The Gamecube rocked my world and titles such as Super Smash Bros. Melee and Pikmin, as well as blasts from the pasts such as Earthbound and Kirby Super Star solidified my status as a Nintendo fanboy, and that was when I truly began to appreciate just how magical their games were. Third parties began to invade my life as well, with Sonic the Hedgehog and Aiai the Monkey from Super Monkey Ball joining the festivities. The Gamecube, despite some harsh criticism from people who didn't realize NINTENDO PLAYS BY THEIR OWN RULES BECAUSE THEY'RE AWESOME, enjoyed a healthy lifespan in terms of game quality and eventually give way to the Wii, where third parties became underappreciated and Nintendo received much unneeded nerd rage.
That's a really tiny nutshell of my life.
We're going to crack that shell open, but ever so slightly, and delicately. The tales I will share in this blog about these games are as close to my heart as those I've had in the real world, and I think it's time to define what it all means to me.
And maybe you'll get to know me a little better.
But first, I need to get this situation surrounding my NES to be cleared up, so the blog probably won't really start to get rolling until then.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
G'luck with the NES. I bought a SNES off eBay for the heck of it a lil while ago, and it's holdin' up fine.
ReplyDeleteThis may surprise you, but I've found that the SNES has the best working record out of all the Nintendo consoles I've owned.
ReplyDeleteNES: Obvious.
N64: Died about five years after we got it, and was replaced quickly. Tried it out again last year (the first one, I mean) and it stopped working after a half hour.
Gamecube: I thought it died nearly three years after I got it, but it turned out it was just the cause of the dirty lens a couple years later.
Did I ever tell you the purple Gamecube has a really nice smell?
Wii: Internal problems over a year and a half after launch and again last fall.
Our first SNES was killed in a basement flood six years back, but the replacement has had absolutely no problems since then.